Over the weekend, a car coming up my block in Harlem idled just long enough for the Puffy pickup-artist routine in Biggie’s “Big Poppa” to ring out, and I thought about how this most recent hip-hop trial of the century isn’t shaking out like the last one. The R. Kelly case, which dovetailed with the Me Too movement, was so successful in highlighting his chilling behavior that his music largely vanished from mainstream rotation. The year-and-a-half-long dive into over a decade of multifaceted accusations against Diddy has not had that same corrosive effect on the reach of the mogul’s music. Mary J. Blige tour set lists still average half a dozen of his productions; you’d have to pry the Biggie CDs out of older hip-hop heads’ dead and petrified fingers, Puff ad-lib or no Puff ad-lib, to break the nostalgic hold of the early Bad Boy era. The kingdom Diddy built is, to people thrilled with the jury returning not-guilty verdicts on everything but prostitution charges, more important than anything we heard in the eight weeks of testimony alleging grave acts of violence in the Sean Combs trial. “He done all this shit for hip-hop,” Louisiana rapper Boosie remarked in a response video to the partial acquittal, too much to be “losing his life behind a relationship.”
The implication that Diddy was just a sex freak in a mutually toxic relationship with Cassie Ventura Fine had set in weeks earlier. His defense carved the image of a consensual relationship out of international accounts of violence and druggy, degrading marathon sexual encounters. In an era of political and social recrimination against women’s rights movements, a saber-rattling postscript to Me Too in many ways, it’s a common reflex to frame victims as co-conspirators in their own mistreatment and abusers as targets of clandestine plots to separate great men from their callings. But what’s true today always has been and probably always will be: It doesn’t matter what or whom you break in America if you can build anything tangible along the way.
Two diverging takeaways from the shocking conclusion of the Combs trial are a shrugging “she wanted to be there” and a pricklier reckoning with the play-by-play of how he controlled events and avoided time for overt partner abuse. Employees knew something was off; stylist Deonte Nash testified about an incident where he and an assistant attempted to physically intervene and defend Cassie only to be thrown off the feral mogul, who told them, “Look what y’all made me do.” The prosecution struggled to get the racketeering and sex-trafficking charges to stick with the jury, just as in RICO and murder cases against Young Thug and Boosie. But anyone even periodically lurking the court reporting got a sample of the power of veiled and unveiled threats from a sometime billionaire: The sex worker who said that Diddy photographing his driver’s license felt like blackmail, the security guard who claimed he turned down a bribe at the hotel where Diddy beat Cassie on camera, and the staffers and artists feeling afraid of reprisal piece together a playbook of classic intimidation.
Diddy’s work should carry the stink of this case forever.
But Diddy’s enterprises, like Bad Boy, Sean John, Cîroc, and Revolt, needed to be monuments to Black entrepreneurial moxie more than light needed to be shed on seemingly indiscriminate violence behind the scenes. Close associates who could have protected alleged victims circled the proverbial wagons where the money resided. You came to understand a pathology that leaves in its wake people like Shyne, the Bad Boy rapper turned Belizean politician who has said he was the fall guy for the 2000 gun charge that Combs also beat (which Diddy denies). You got the vibe that everyone is either buyable or expendable, just as with I Want to Work for Diddy. Making the Band continued for two years after choreographer Laurieann Gibson left, saying Diddy “menaced” her with a chair during filming, footage that of course never quite made it into the episode (he denied the allegation). The trial called into question that very star-making interest; you wondered if he ever truly cared about building a career for Cassie, the premise for their first meeting. Dozens of songs were recorded that we never heard.
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The vein of unmitigated joy this week — online and outside the Manhattan courthouse, a scene of supportive chants, baby oil, and a 1999 Lil’ Kim Grammy costume — about a Black man beating the odds is reductive. It ignores the many Black women and men steamrolled in the maintenance of vaunted music, nightlife, and television empires. The trend cuts the way the rest of the world does nowadays: toward further exploitation of talented dreamers by men who could change their lives if they weren’t more interested in the basest of gratification. It does not lift people up; it has no interest in rehabilitating the men it defends, only in the blanket denial of wrongdoing that keeps the rich comfortably insulated, in the outcome that doesn’t ask anyone to change their ways. It does not teach young men to be great, just that cold titans of business always get their way.
In the coming days and weeks the public perspective of what happened this spring and summer will be on the move, pruned by people who feel there’s much to learn from Diddy’s boardroom and beat-making acumen but not so much from the dark machinations that tore it all apart. “Ppl wanna charge you so bad for being freaky,” Xscape singer and reality-TV star Tiny Cottle posted before deleting. “YOU PLAN THIS ‘LICK’ PLEASE DONT BE MAD AT ME BUT I DONT SEE YOU AS A ‘VICTIM,’” Hot 97’s Funkmaster Flex wrote, addressing Cassie directly on Instagram. Diddy’s work should carry the stink of this case forever. He slipped free from big time again at the cost of it being made plain what terror he’s capable of. But Flex’s gall is instructive. Many hip-hop capitalists and their admirers would love for you to forget the horrors of the trial, to work the ruling into motivational, absolving pap. A shroud of church cheer that historically papers over sex crimes has emerged here as well. The tremendous psychic gap between prayerful celebrations and victims’ bruises and tears tells you everything you need to know about why the machine produces such grisly results.
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